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Ask HN: Why does Firefox have such a low market share anyways?

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Re: Ask HN: Why does Firefox have such a low market share anyways?

#211

Post by reportgunner »

JohnFen wrote: post #193
WorldMaker wrote: post #157

An opinion of mine is that Firefox's market share has to be greatly under-reported at this point. Built-in, on-by-default tracking protection disables some of the impact of exactly the sorts of trackers that report this sort of market share data. I think that's why the numbers vary so much depending on where you look. No other browser seems to have reporting problems like that. Plus, one of the major sources of such…

> Anecdotally, everyone I know that used Firefox has stuck with it or deepened there reliance on it I find this interesting, because I literally don't know a single person who uses FF regularly anymore, even amongst my hacker friends. 10 years ago, 100% of them did.

> I literally don't know a single person who uses FF regularly anymore

Perhaps the FF users don't feel the need to tell you ?

Re: Ask HN: Why does Firefox have such a low market share anyways?

#212

Post by thiht »

JohnFen wrote: post #193
WorldMaker wrote: post #157

An opinion of mine is that Firefox's market share has to be greatly under-reported at this point. Built-in, on-by-default tracking protection disables some of the impact of exactly the sorts of trackers that report this sort of market share data. I think that's why the numbers vary so much depending on where you look. No other browser seems to have reporting problems like that. Plus, one of the major sources of such…

> Anecdotally, everyone I know that used Firefox has stuck with it or deepened there reliance on it I find this interesting, because I literally don't know a single person who uses FF regularly anymore, even amongst my hacker friends. 10 years ago, 100% of them did.

Sample size = 1

In my life I've always come back to Firefox at some point, for various reasons. But I'm currently NOT using it anymore:

- on my personal laptop I'm using Safari because battery life is my #1 priority, and Safari is the best in this particular category. I'm also using Safari on my iPhone because it works well enough, and I find favorites and tabs sync useful

- on my pro laptop I used to use Firefox Developer Edition because I've always preferred Firefox devtools to Chrome-like devtools. But I've recently switched to Arc and I love it. I've tried vertical tabs in the past on Firefox but the experience sucks, it's half baked and ugly. Arc is not perfect but it solves quite a few pain points I had in the past. I still prefer FF devtools, but Arc's experience is better aligned with my intuitive workflow.

So yeah, for me to switch back to Firefox, they need to improve battery life drastically (they're not even bad at it, but Safari is just so much better), and try major innovations regarding user experience.

Re: Ask HN: Why does Firefox have such a low market share anyways?

#213

Post by EspressoGPT »

WorldMaker wrote: post #157

An opinion of mine is that Firefox's market share has to be greatly under-reported at this point. Built-in, on-by-default tracking protection disables some of the impact of exactly the sorts of trackers that report this sort of market share data. I think that's why the numbers vary so much depending on where you look. No other browser seems to have reporting problems like that. Plus, one of the major sources of such…

> Anecdotally, everyone I know that used Firefox has stuck with it

You guys know people that use Firefox?

Re: Ask HN: Why does Firefox have such a low market share anyways?

#214

Post by EspressoGPT »

hinata08 wrote: post #34

Some users don't understand the difference between the web / an ISP / a website / a search engine / a web browser / an OS /... because of massive advertising from Google, that went on all the segments, and also did so much anti competition that it was charged in the EU For some, Google is the brand for the tech, and everything else like Firefox is a knock off, or a pedantic complication. It's a scary world we're livi…

This. People don't know the difference between a browser and a search engine, and that's a good thing for Google.

Re: Ask HN: Why does Firefox have such a low market share anyways?

#215

Post by EspressoGPT »

typon wrote: post #97

I don't understand how people can use a browser without Container Tabs. This is a killer feature of Firefox and so many people don't even know about it.

Are you serious? Sorry to be so pointed here, but Container Tabs are a nerdy niche feature that no normal user cares about.

Re: Ask HN: Why does Firefox have such a low market share anyways?

#216

Post by matthewfelgate »

acheron wrote: post #13

Google wanted more control over the Internet, so they created a browser that they controlled and pushed it on people by leveraging their monopoly in a separate area. You know, the kind of thing we used to think was bad in the 1990s.

In my view, this isn't accurate. Chrome was created at the time because browsers weren't great and Google wanted browsers to be faster. Chrome grew in popularity not because of pushing but because it was genuinely a much higher quality browser for a long time.

Re: Ask HN: Why does Firefox have such a low market share anyways?

#217

Post by hulitu »

wussboy wrote: post #63
wintorez wrote: post #17

I was an avid Firefox user, until it started adding services that I never asked for, namely Pocket. Things that should have been an add-on were now a core feature of the product.

This attitude has always confused me. “Firefox did something I didn’t like so I switched to a browser which does hundreds of things to undermine the free and open internet”.

> so I switched to a browser which does hundreds of things to undermine the free and open internet

like 1. forcing DNS over HTTPS 2. Copying Chrome UI and destroying usability (why do i have to edit a file to get back scrollbar) 3. Droping support for FTP (because everybody i.e Chrome is doing it) 4. Droping suport for localhost (because everybody i.e Chrome is doing it) and so on.

Re: Ask HN: Why does Firefox have such a low market share anyways?

#218

Post by definitelyauser »

Personally, I ditched Firefox due to poor performance. Especially on infinite-scroll pages, Firefox would just stutter and become unusable.

Maybe it's improved, but my impression was that of a browser gradually getting worse.

Furthermore, not all websites seems to care much if it breaks in Firefox.

Re: Ask HN: Why does Firefox have such a low market share anyways?

#220

Post by vikasr111 »

nojvek wrote: post #219

Firefox was a great browser, haven’t tried it in years. Last I tried it was slow memory hog. They also fired a whole bunch of great engineers during Covid. Many websites I tried looked off it didn’t work in Firefox. Had to switch to chrome.

I gave it another try after many years and I must say since last year or so they made significant improvement in performance and speed. Another area they shine particularly well is privacy. They made some privacy features baked into the browser itself, which is a good move.
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